


where the world ends

by Odaigahara



Series: Whumptober 2020 Plus [5]
Category: Sanders Sides (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Space, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Creativity | Roman "Princey" Sanders & Dark Creativity | Remus "The Duke" Sanders Are Twins, Gen, Humans are space orcs, Non-Sexual Slavery, Space Battles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-02
Updated: 2021-01-02
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:28:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28497588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Odaigahara/pseuds/Odaigahara
Summary: Day 4: Collapsed Building*The emergency lights flash electric blue, flooding the cargo hold cerulean. Roman flinches at the brightness- sunglasses are another thing humans apparently don’t need, even though every other crew member is from a planet with twogiant suns- and curses in a muffled exhale, scrabbling towards the cargo bay doors before they seal him off.That shade of blue meansevacuate at once, leave everything behind. The captain won’t leave them if he has another choice, since humans are so profitable to have on a ship, but he might take one and leave the other if it comes down to it. Roman can’t run for the shuttles first.He has to make sure Remus gets there ahead of him.If Remus is locked in his quarters, he might not get there at all.
Relationships: Creativity | Roman "Princey" Sanders & Dark Creativity | Remus "The Duke" Sanders
Series: Whumptober 2020 Plus [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1954141
Comments: 15
Kudos: 42





	where the world ends

**Author's Note:**

  * For [candycorns](https://archiveofourown.org/users/candycorns/gifts).



> I am finishing these prompts damn it!! Until it is NEXT october, i will not yield
> 
> Many thanks as always to alicat54c for beta reading!! Trigger warnings at end notes.
> 
> (Also, Candy, I'm pretty sure you're the one who gave me the new years' prompt, so... here ya go?)

The proximity alarms go off shrieking, but it’s a bare two seconds of warning. The ship lists sharply sideways, sending Roman careening into the bolted-down crates; then the artificial gravity fails and he’s floating, clamoring for a handhold, trying desperately to catch his breath. The oxygen’s thinning. Somewhere in the ship, there’s almost certainly been a breach.

Roman is the only crew member in the cargo hold. Remus is in his quarters- should be in his quarters, at least- and he’ll be closer to the escape pods if the captain hasn’t locked him in again. The others are on the bridge or in living areas, maybe in the lab if they’re dealing with the captured insectile bird things from Naberius; if the breach happened there, the rest of the crew is screwed. If it happened somewhere uninhabited, somewhere it can be contained-

Still, what the _hell?_

Automatic navigation should have circumvented space junk or an asteroid. Nothing should have been able to hit them this hard, even with the shields of questionable quality they’d had to scrounge up from the middle of Meteorsville, Nowhere. Roman scrambles for his breather mask, pulling it on with a painful jerk, and struggles not to grit his teeth against the painful tightness at his jaw. It’s so hard to _talk_ in these things.

He would have argued for something that didn’t double as basically a muzzle, but he got the feeling at the time that the captain saw that as a plus. Anything to control Remus, even if it meant buying unnecessary safety equipment for the most durable members of the crew. Roman knows what the Buitek said about the two of them when the captain hired their services.

The emergency lights flash electric blue, flooding the cargo hold cerulean. Roman flinches at the brightness- sunglasses are another thing humans apparently don’t need, even though every other crew member is from a planet with two _giant suns_ \- and curses in a muffled exhale, scrabbling towards the cargo bay doors before they seal him off. That shade of blue means _evacuate at once, leave everything behind._ The captain won’t leave them if he has another choice, since humans are so profitable to have on a ship, but he might take one and leave the other if it comes down to it. Roman can’t run for the shuttles first.

He has to make sure Remus gets there ahead of him, except if Remus is locked in his quarters he might not get there at all.

Zero-G makes his stomach lurch with a feeling not unlike having his organs shove themselves backwards up his throat. Roman fights through it, propelling himself past the Quintesson weapons and smuggled Corian silks, the cases of adrenaline shots he and Remus have to tolerate being harvested for and the tubes of intoxicating Draxan Leaguer blood. One of them has broken open completely, gobs of sparkling yellow floating through the thinning pressurized atmosphere like orbs of light; Roman flies straight through it, inhaling enough to overdose a Buitek twelve times over, and has to resist the urge to sneeze. His palms smear golden handprints on the control panel as he fumbles with it.

It flashes a rejection. Roman swears. He isn’t authorized for manual override- of course he isn’t, or he’d override his own quarters all the time when the terror hits and he can’t stand knowing Remus is locked up _away from him_ \- but Roman snarls and tries again anyway, inputting every command he’s learned or stolen in his time with the crew.

Denied. Denied. _Denied_ , God, _please don't do this to him-_

Roman sucks in a searing breath, braces himself, and smashes his elbow through the panel instead.

The shock is so hot it _freezes_ , absolutely agonizing. Roman blacks out for a long moment, but this isn’t one of his and Remus’s escape attempts; no one comes in to electrocute him further, or drag him somewhere to be conditioned while his mind is still reeling from the pain. He can get up, after. He can take a breath through his too-tight mask and pry the door open himself, locks disengaged.

The corridors sear his vision that same warning blue, alarms screeching like dolphins over his head. Far louder than they need to be, for a human’s ears. Roman has to wince again, head pounding, and hope that Remus hasn’t been slapped in the face by the noise.

Ten minutes. That’s the standard evacuation time, once the blue lights have started up. Ten minutes, and who knows how many he’s wasted, whether Remus suffocated or they were both left behind while Roman was passed out on the ground like a damsel in _distress-_

Another locked door. Roman’s codes work on this one, thank Oscar Wilde, but he has to beat the next one open just like the first, and it’s only luck that he finds the locking mechanism offline before his arrival. Questionable luck, since Remus’s part of the ship losing power is a bad fucking sign, but Roman likes to believe in miniature happy endings, at least.

Measure each story in six seconds like a Vine, and good things happen at the end nearly half the time. Six seconds, and Roman gets food! Six seconds, and he sees Remus! Six seconds, and he completes a task!

Funny how it feels like baiting a dog into following its commands, even if the dog is, metaphorically speaking, Roman himself.

Finally the right segment of the ship. Overhead, the comm system blurts out a string of alien words- Roman thinks it’s Buiteki of all things, weirdly enough- then another in a more fluid language, a third that sounds like grinding rocks-

“Remus?” Roman shouts, tearing off his mask. The air is so thin it makes his nose sting, lungs forcing deep painful inhales to keep full. “Remus! Are you there?”

He can’t hear a response through the door. Beating this one won’t do any good, since it’s fortified against humans, but if Remus is trapped on the other side- if he’s hurt, or _dead-_

_“Remus!”_

The comm system starts blaring Drax-Corian pidgeon, the language the crew uses to speak to Roman and Remus. Roman kicks the control panel, helplessly, and tries to pry away the edges to disengage the lock manually. The power is cut off to half of the mechanisms. All he has to do is brute force it, but that’s what Remus always tries, and the captain isn’t _stupid._ He knows how to protect against escape attempts.

“Your ship has been disabled by League authorities in accordance with Section 4.5RH.6 in regards to illicit biological material. Please remain on the bridge for apprehension by trade enforcement. Please do not panic. Please do not attempt escape.”

“I’ll attempt all I fucking _want_ ,” Roman shrills, near-hysterical, and tears off a fingernail trying to get past the metallic covering. There’s a gap between panel and wall, sliver-thin; he forces his pinkie through it, pulling it wider even as his fingers cut and bleed, and yanks out every wire he can reach with the other hand. The door hisses, hydraulics slackening; Roman turns his attention to it next, putting his lagging strength into shoving it aside, and slams into the wall behind him as the ship jolts.

The motion sends him reeling. Roman shoves off the wall, drags his way into Remus’s quarters, and finds an empty, ransacked chamber.

Relief and terror collide inside him, making him choke with something close to a sob. He has to drag his mask back on, head so light he’ll pass out if he doesn’t. Empty. The cell- the _room_ \- is empty, so Remus has to be somewhere else. Maybe he was on duty too, or taken as muscle on an excursion to an outer planet, one of the ones that doesn’t care if you bring an illegal species to the surface. Maybe he’s at an escape pod, holding everyone up so Roman can get to safety.

Or maybe he’s gone with the rest of the crew. Maybe he’s finally realized that Roman is holding him back, keeping him from escaping like he has since they were abducted--since before, even, when Roman was the smothered favorite and Remus the favorite scapegoat _._

“Your ship has been disabled by League authorities in accordance with Section 4.5RH.6 in regards to illicit biological material. Please remain on the bridge for apprehension by trade enforcement. Please do not panic. Please do not attempt-”

A shriek of different alarms, the ones for the atmospheric controls, and the warning lights flush from blue to _red-_

Roman can’t reach the exit before the auxiliary doors slide shut on their unused tracks, and then the quarters won’t open for anything. Roman can’t even try; on the other side is the vacuum, the long cold nothing of space, an icy black perdition. If he put a hole in the blast doors, he’d be sucked through immediately, or suffocate as all the air was sucked out first.

He stares at the closed doors, claustrophobic terror closing in. It’s so much worse than being captured, because at least that time he knew Remus was alive. Now, for all Roman knows, Remus has been dead since the first impact. He has no way to contact him.

Oh. Roman’s breath catches in his throat, which is a real feat considering he’s still wearing the damn breather mask. He and Remus used to communicate on the sly, before their crewmates found out. They had personal comms, and Roman lost _his_ , but his brother's was never found. Remus told the captain that he’d eaten it. If Roman can find it, set it to an open channel, try to reach the shuttles-

The sleeping pad has no room for hiding things underneath. The walls are bare, no furniture to throw around, only one storage container for clothes and hygiene. Roman tears through it, sending alien cloth flying wildly around his head, and finds a vial of cheap mouthwash, meant for cleaning herbivores’ teeth more efficiently than human toothbrushes and far too mild for human use. 

“Joke’s on you, Captain,” he huffs to himself, grinning despite everything. Remus never so much as brushed his teeth back on Earth. 

The inside of the vial contains nothing but a metallic chip. Roman slots it into his wristband, keying it to the common channel, and receives a soft _ping_ of connection.

Remus immediately shrills, _“Where the fuck are you?”_ Roman almost sobs with relief. “ _Tinkerbell’s disengaging, if you haven’t reached a pod yet you’d better get there right the fuck now. Run like you’re a methhead wearing someone else’s pants and there’s cops on your tail!”_

“Someone else’s pants?” Roman asks, almost laughing. God, hearing his brother’s voice is- he can’t- “I swear to Hera’s hatred of adultery, if this is a lead-up to a sex joke-”

 _“Nah, you just always say they’re someone else’s pants if there’s drugs in ‘em, it’s like a rule!”_ Remus cackles, but there’s an undercurrent of mania behind it that sets Roman on edge. _“You’re on the way, right? Or in a shuttle?”_

The ship shudders again, and the floor lurches violently, tilting sideways like a falling top. Roman gets the sick feeling he’s just disconnected from the rest of the structure. “I’m in a shuttle,” he says, employing all his theater club skill to keep from choking up. “I’ll meet you on the surface, so long as the captain doesn’t split the crew.”

_“Promise?”_

“Your ship has been disabled by League authorities-”

“I promise,” Roman says. He has to take great, whooping gasps just to keep from passing out. “Remus, I promise, just like in _West Side Story_ -”

 _“Sperm to worm,"_ his brother agrees _._

Roman scoffs. “I _prefer_ womb to tomb.”

 _“And_ I _prefer it when you don’t lie to me!"_

“-accordance with Section 4.5RH.6 in regards to illicit biological material-”

“Remus-”

 _“I can_ hear _them,”_ Remus snaps. _“What are they saying, brother mine? How long before they see what you are? They’re gonna make your brains melt out your ears and pull you apart and you won’t be illegal then, not even a human then, so it won’t count, right? They won’t have to report you_. _Illegal species don’t_ get _rights.”_

“No one’s seen me,” Roman forces out. “I’m trapped, that’s all, they won’t know the least about us so long as you get _away-”_

 _“I don’t want to get away!”_ Remus screams, and the red lights blind Roman’s eyes. The atmosphere is critically low. Please, Remus, please just give up- _“Where are you? That asshole Corian’s dead, I’m the only one in here, I’ll come get you!”_

“You will not,” Roman says desperately, blood running cold. His chest feels like it’s caving in on itself, spots dancing in his eyes. His heart is pounding at his ribs like a jackhammer on stimulants.

“Please remain on the bridge for apprehension by trade enforcement. Please do not panic.”

_“Bitch, try me-”_

“I’ve got thirty seconds of oxygen at most,” Roman blurts, “ _maybe_ a minute, and if you come after me, you’ll break the seal and send me into open space! It’s already too late for me, don’t you understand that?”

“We are detecting life signs. If you are a crew member, please surrender. If you are a prisoner, please do not be alarmed. We do not mean you harm. A species of your thermal signature was not registered in your ship’s manifest. These are not registered as living quarters. Why aren’t they registered as living quarters? Of all the irresponsible-”

“Shut _up!”_ Roman shouts at the comms. “Remus, I’m sorry I wasn’t a better brother to you.”

“A rescue is underway. Please stand away from the-”

_“Don’t you dare!”_

“I’m sorry I ran away, I’m sorry I was such a jerk to you when we were kids and also I was the one who kissed Remy at that one party, I know I said it was you and you forgot but I _lied,_ and I’m sorry I got us abducted-”

_“_ **_Roman!”_ **

Roman crushes the comm. Then he takes off his breather mask and sits against the back wall, arms around his knees. If he’s lucky, he’ll suffocate and his body will cool, and their attackers won’t learn there were humans aboard at all. They'll assume their rescue was too late, and they'll leave. Remus might be safe then.

Hell, without Roman, there won't be anything stopping him from escaping their captain completely. He'll be free as a migratory songbird.

Roman might be crying, but without gravity, tears are just little saltwater blobs. He doesn't have to feel them streaming down his face.

He's fine. Everything important is going to be fine.

The Leaguers are still talking over the comms, rapping out orders in every galactic language Roman recognizes and several he doesn’t. He can't imagine what’s got them sounding so frantic-

But the wall blows in, slamming his skull back against the wall, and his vision reds out before he can learn.

**Author's Note:**

> TW: captivity, slavery, implied/ambiguous character death, loss of fingernails, suffocation


End file.
